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The Democratic Alliance in Mpumalanga has urged the provincial Education Department to swiftly tackle the problem of alleged ghost workers, which are costing taxpayers millions of rands. A recent report from the Auditor General showed that the department has incurred around R1.8 billion in irregular expenditure over the past two years. This amount reportedly resulted from salary overpayments to employees whose services were terminated due to death, resignation, retirement or dismissal. The DA’s spokesperson on Education in Mpumalanga, Annerie Weber, calls for accountability within the Education Department. “The system is not complicated. Every month, the payroll is uploaded. So, if someone has passed on, being retired, being fired or resigned, they should be deleted and excluded from payments, but this does not happen. The DA demands accountability and that there must be supporting audits and mandatory quarterly reports.” Weber adds: “This will lead to proper consequence management. The implicated should then be identified and should be prosecuted. The money must be recovered at all cost and should be redirected and used for growth, jobs and services.” Meanwhile, the Mpumalanga Education Department spokesperson, Gerald Sambo, has refuted the allegations of ghost workers within their system. Sambo, however, acknowledges challenges with their system updates. “Well, there is something that we can do, but there is something we cannot do because at the end of the day, the salary interface is a system’s issue. But what we can indicate is that we are able to recoup the money but we have also trained our employees, especially at the school level, also strengthen the monitoring system at a circuit level to ensure that whenever there are death cases, they are reported on time and we are able to intervene and ensure that through the processes, we stop that salary from going through.” Related Video | Mpumalanga Education Department refutes ghost workers’ claims
